Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I said this in another thread but I'll say it again here.

I am downright shocked at just how much of a failure this technology has turned out to be. How can this many brilliant people work on an area for this long and produce almost nothing of value?

I suppose it happens in areas of "pathological science" like infinite energy machines, but those are areas where the tech doesn't work and probably violates laws of physics. In this case the tech does work in the general sense but seems to have little to no utility in most cases. When you consider scams and fraud it may even have negative utility.

I'd like to be proven wrong. I keep waiting for that killer cryptocurrency app but it never arrives. Meanwhile the core use case of digital money seems almost abandoned.

It's not even that good anymore for black and grey market commerce. It was in the beginning because the authorities didn't understand it. It was security through obscurity. Now they're developing both expertise and legal frameworks for dealing with it. It's no longer a free-for-all.

I have trouble thinking of another technology that actually works that has attracted this much hype, brains, and investment and then failed this badly to deliver.

It's not like fusion, which has a very clear use case but faces so far insurmountable technical challenges. It's not like nuclear fission power which works, has a clear use, but has downsides.

I think the nearest comparison I can come up with are failed government mega-projects like the US Reagan-era "Star Wars" laser missile defense system, airplane-like space shuttles, or giant planned utopian cities that get built and then sit vacant.

I'm also shocked and a little horrified at just how much fraud there is in this space. I'd expect some, but the sheer volume of fraud is breathtaking. Almost all ICOs seem to be scams. Many exchanges are likely scams. Tether looks like a scam. It makes me disappointed in humanity that there are this many bad actors out there just waiting for a new way to fleece people.

Just... wow. What a waste.

> suppose it happens in areas of "pathological science" like infinite energy machines

I'd draw analogies to pyramid-schemes and "multi-level marketing", which are both "successful" but not in a good way.

I feel the collective "blockchain" mind-scape is absolutely dominated by nontechnical aspects, like the idea you can "get rich quick", and the assumption that you can find a "greater fool" to ensure your profit from a dodgy-product or speculative buying. This crowds out "actual engineering" and tends to corrupt whatever is left.

Well said. I got swept up in the hype and my job suffered for it. This is a negative value.

But I do think in terms of vision and coordination, blockchain has extended the horizons of what can be achieved.

FYI: the "Star Wars" laser missile defense system was not entirely a failure.

There were 2 parts to SDI:

1) space-based rocket-based ABM, which worked well. You can watch the SDI video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFGNo9fbf8o

2) laser missile interception, which did not work at the time.

However, with recent improvements in fiber optic transmission efficiency, this works on ships today.

The Russians have an ABM ring around Moscow based on ABM rockets.

Both Reagan and the Russian leadership did not accept the MAD doctrine, hence the above defense programs.

> How can this many brilliant people work on an area for this long and produce almost nothing of value?

To be fair, it made some folks who got lucky and bought in early nice and wealthy. Which then attracted a gaggle of shysters, hucksters and fraudsters.

When you drill down the key thing that gets people sucked in to Satoshi's Blockchain, it is naked greed. Everything layered on top about the technology, or "DLT" or whatever buzzwords these people spout is just window dressing. All of them want to Get Rich Quick and drive off into the sunset in a lambo from their bitcoin gainz.

If money is the root of all evil, give technologists and futurists the ability to print money they can swindle muggles into pouring their life savings into as a get rich quick scheme or espouse at a pitch about how life changing it is and how much excessive amounts of money they need to get paid to copy paste half the Bitcoin Core or Etherium repo.

You see pretty fast the dissolution of values in the face of potential fortune. Its an ancient aspect of humanity - the first European explorers in the Americas would slaughter whole countries on the whisper of treasure to be had.

Good point about the conquistadors. I've always thought that many of them probably did come here with utopian ideals about founding pure societies and bringing the word of God to the natives (in a positive way at least as they thought of it), but once they got a whiff of gold and riches greed took over and pretty soon they were committing genocide.

People really do get weird around lots of money, especially if there's an opportunity to get rich quick. I think some really atavistic predator instincts can kick in.

Actually, it is the love of money (φιλαργυρία) that is stated to be the root of all evil.

It's only been ten years and it takes on average around 40 years for a new technology to become useful. And this technology is much bigger and more complicated than the average new breakthrough technology, like the semiconductor or whatever.

I don't think you can compare Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency to semiconductors at all. Cryptocurrency is really not all that complex a technology. Once you grasp it it's pretty simple, especially if you understand cryptography and a little bit of game theory.

I do still hold out some hope that the tech will evolve and eventually catch on, or that it will lead to something else, but the first big incarnation cycle of cryptocurrency seems like a total failure to a shocking degree.

> I do still hold out some hope that the tech will evolve and eventually catch on

I'd posit it's not possible for DLT to fail any more than it was possible for email to fail. Yeah adoption could have been slower if the first email clients were shittier or whatever, but at the end of the day one-to-one or one-to-many instant written communication solves a real problem and I just don't see any possible universe where the idea wouldn't have eventually worked.

The conceptual breakthrough of DLT is basically using an algorithm to mathematically guarantee that two numbers sum to zero rather than taking the word of a supposedly neutral (and very expensive) third-party. Once you make that discovery there just isn't any universe where that doesn't outcompete the status quo, any more than we have globally competitive societies who haven't adopted things like fire or the wheel.

The reason it's taking so long to get real products (let alone adoption) is that it requires basically reorganizing our entire society, which doesn't exactly move on a dime.

Part of the problem though is that the algorithm is fantastically expensive, possibly more so than managing, policing, and occasionally replacing central organizations.

There is no tech to evolve.

Bitcoin was made of old, already-existing pieces. All the parts existed by 2001, but it wasn't until 2008 that someone put them together to make a system that could exchange unique tokens without a central authority.

Trouble is, the term "blockchain technology" is a way of fudging the fact that none of the good bits are new. And whether the new bits are good, well, there's a 10-year track record of not a lot so far apart from asset bubbles.

Where did you get your 40 year claim? Plenty of research claims otherwise, e.g., https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-pace-of-technology-adoption-is-s...

Even your semiconductor example was immediately adopted and used. A decade into Blockchain and it's still all claim and no adoption, as this study found.

From the famous Carlotta Perez book.

The reason tech adoption looks like it’s speeding up is that in that chart is just that they’re looking at more and more trivial examples. E.g. the cell phone might create huge changes in human behavior, but they’re not really a foundational technology. They’re more of an incrementally better version of a phone and a computer.

How is block chain not also a trivial example and an incrementally better version of previous technology? It addresses a tiny, tiny problem compared to items on that chart. If you're claiming that things on that chart are shorter because they're less important, then blockchain, being even less important no matter how you believe it, falls into the same argument.

That chart has for recent things gaining widespread adoption: internet, cellphone, computer, (left off web adoption), microwave. Do you think the blockchain is actually bigger than any of those?

Or is it more likely what it has shown so far - nearly zero benefit compared to the claims? It's not like it hasn't had ample time to blossom and get integrated into everywhere. It simply solves a problem almost no one needs solved.

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